When immigration supporters needed just a handful of words
Neither a Holocaust survivor nor the woman associated with the Statue of Liberty needed more than the equivalent of a tweet to have an impact
A few words, less than the length of a tweet, can make an astonishing amount of difference. Even if the words go back many years, to the period after World War II or even to the 19th century, and then disappear for a time. And if they had to do with an emotional subject — say, immigration — they can still have meaning today.
After World War II, many of the Jews who survived the Holocaust were not welcome in America. Hundreds of thousands were kept in detention in Europe, sometimes on the same grounds as the concentration camps where they had been imprisoned by the Nazis. They were held there initially by General George Patton, who did not much care for Jews — “lower than animals,” he wrote in his journal — and then, with U.S. policy makers reluctant to let many in, for as long as five years with the opportunity to take classes but still in facilities for displaced persons.
“Nobody wanted them,” said Menachem Z. Rosensaft, who was born to Holocaust survivors in the former Bergen-Belsen concentration camp three years after the end of World War II. “They became an inconvenience to the world.”
Desperately trying to get the survivors out of Europe, some American Jews waged a public relations campaign to draw attention to their plight. They thought that, if they could spotlight individual survivors, perhaps it could lead to change in the nation’s immigration policies.
Their efforts paid off on July 6, 1947, when a 20-year-old Holocaust survivor named Siegbert Freiberg was interviewed on a live New York radio show. Freiberg had grown up in Berlin. Five years after his father was sent temporarily to Buchenwald concentration camp, he found refuge in a German household after nearly being rounded up with other Jews for Auschwitz. Freiberg lost his entire family except his father, who had been released from Buchenwald and made it to Shanghai during the war.
After Freiberg described his experiences on the radio show, the drama began to build. The announcer asked if he would recognize his father after all those years. “I’m sure I would,” Freiberg replied. “A son always remembers his father.” The announcer then told him to turn around. His father was standing behind him. What radio listeners heard next was a piercing scream and sobbing, as the father and son who doubted they would ever see each other again embraced in disbelief.
“The elderly gentleman is really overcome with emotion,” said the announcer, who seemed to be fighting back tears himself. “He can’t speak.”
Even if the father, Max Freiberg, could have spoken, the listeners would not have understood much. The older Freiberg, the son would later explain, knew very little English and generally used only four words.
So successful was the broadcast that father and son were invited back the following week. It may have been the first time that a Holocaust victim spoke about his experience to a radio audience. “The case of Siegbert Freiberg was a watershed in altering and redirecting public opinion to the plight of Holocaust victims,” said Henry Sapoznik, a radio producer and historian.
The interview would have been lost to history except that the Federal Communications Commission required that all radio programs be recorded on acetate discs in case there were complaints. Sapoznik discovered the disc many years later in a Bronx warehouse. The father-son reunion was rebroadcast on NPR in 2002, a month after Seigbert Freiberg died peacefully in Queens at the age of 75.
NPR also aired an interview in which Frieberg talked about his father and his four words of English. He said they spent an emotional week after their reunion, talking about their lost family members as they roamed around New York. At some point during that week, they saw the Statue of Liberty.
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The statue only became a symbol of immigration because of a handful of words by a woman who had been born almost exactly 100 years earlier. When Emma Lazarus was a child, reading books and writing poetry, there was little to suggest that she would become an advocate for destitute newcomers to America. She grew up in a wealthy, New York City family that could trace its roots to America’s earliest Jewish settlers. She and her father, as with the Freibergs, were very close, and her father published a book of her poems when she was 17. Later she corresponded with well-known writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and became increasingly known for essays, translations, and other writings as she moved comfortably in the city’s upper-class circles.
But New York in 1881 began receiving waves of Jewish refugees fleeing deadly pogroms in Russia that erupted after the assassination of Czar Alexander II. Like so many other immigrants, they did not find much of a welcome in their new home. An article in a popular New York magazine denounced them as “loathsome parasites” that could spread “all kinds of horrible and dangerous contagions.” Many were quartered on Ward’s Island in the East River, contending with dirty water and overflowing garbage.
Lazurus began to visit them. Deeply moved, she wrote an exposé about the conditions on Ward’s Island and took the streetcar from her well-furnished home to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society in lower Manhattan to teach English to the newcomers. “What would my society friends say if they saw me here?” she would sometimes ask. Her once flowery writings now focused on the gritty needs of immigrants.
At that time, New York City was preparing for an imposing structure more than 150 feet high that, once mounted on a massive pedestal, would tower over any of its buildings. Known as “The Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World,” it was a gift of friendship from the French people and a celebration of America’s success in building an enduring democracy. But when the United States was asked to foot the bill for the statue’s pedestal, political leaders balked. Congress declined to approve an appropriation of $100,000, and legislation by the state of New York for $50,000 ran into a veto by the governor.
Lazarus was not especially interested either. When civic leaders launched fundraising efforts, she initially declined to contribute a poem for an 1883 auction. A number of well-known painters and authors, including Mark Twain and Walt Whitman, agreed to contribute sketches and writings. But Lazarus, uncomfortable with writing “to order,” didn’t know what she would say.
And then one of the organizers pointed out to her that the statue would be holding out her torch to arriving immigrants.
This provided the spark. Lazarus, greatly stirred (“her dark eyes deepened,” according to a contemporary account), sat down to write a sonnet that brushed aside both the statue’s name and what it was intended to symbolize. Titled “The New Colossus,” the poem about welcoming exiles from other lands won high marks and was republished in newspapers. But soon it was forgotten. When President Grover Cleveland dedicated the Statue of Liberty in 1886, he focused on its commanding size and the nation’s friendship with France. Immigrants were not mentioned.
Lazarus died the following year, most likely from Hodgkin’s lymphoma. She was only 38. All her writings gradually faded from memory.
Except one. Some two decades after Lazarus wrote “The New Colossus,” a friend of hers named Georgina Schuyler — a descendant of Alexander Hamilton, himself an immigrant — raised money to engrave the 14-line poem on a bronze tablet. She had it placed on the second floor of the statue’s pedestal. Visitors took notice. People across the country began quoting several lines from the poem, especially 13 words. Those words gradually became the voice of the statue and, in a sense, even of America.
The plaque was moved to the front entrance of the statue in 1945, just two years before the reunion of the Freibergs. The words resonated during that era’s battle over immigration. They continue to inspire today. Advocates across the nation, fighting the proposed clampdown on immigrants, have been waving signs and tweeting Lazarus’s words:
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free …”
Just 13 words.
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Father and son gazed at the Statue of Liberty. Although the United States often tried to close its doors — most infamously with the Immigration Act of 1924 that sharply limited those from eastern and southern Europe and barred Arabs and Asians altogether — the statue had nevertheless welcomed millions over the years. As the younger Freiberg would later tell radio listeners, his father was so moved by this symbol of immigration that he used his four words of English.
Those four words had served Max Freiberg well. When someone in New York spoke to him and he didn’t understand, he would respond with his four words. People appreciated what he had to say. The words were not as poetic as those of Lazarus. But it was a special time then, after the victory of World War II, and the words had a power of their own.
Safe now, in his adopted country and reunited with his son, the older Freiberg gazed at the statue and spoke the four words in his new language:
“Thank God for America.”
Sources
1. The experience of Holocaust survivors after World War II, and the quotes from Patton and Rosensaft, are from a 2015 article by New York Times reporter Eric Lichtblau, “Surviving the Nazis, Only to Be Jailed by America.”
2. Excerpts from Freiberg’s radio interviews can be heard at the Yiddish Radio Project: Reunion with Siegbert Freiberg. Additional background about the Freibergs and the radio interview is at Eavesdropping on a Generation by Maggie Riechers (for the National Endowment for the Humanities).
3. Henry Sapoznik’s role and more details about Siegbert Freibert can be found in his 2002 New York Times obituary by Douglas Martin, Siegbert Freiberg Dies at 75; Told Radio Audience of Boyhood Escape from Holocaust.
4. Extensive information about Emma Lazarus can be found in the Jewish Women’s Archives, Women of Valor. Recent articles about Lazarus, in connection with the current debate over immigration, include “‘Give me your tired, your poor’: The story of poet and refugee advocate Emma Lazarus,” by Katie Mettler in the Washington Post, and “That Statue of Liberty Poem Everybody Quotes?” by Ryan Poll on History News Network.
5. The fundraising efforts for the pedestal are summarized by Robert C. Kennedy on the New York Times Learning Network, http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/harp/0502.html.
6. The National Park Service includes the role of Georgina Schuyler on its Statue of Liberty website. The connection to Alexander Hamilton is mentioned in a 2011 New York Times article by Sam Roberts, “How a Sonnet Made a Statue the “Mother of Exiles.”
The Roberts article concludes by quoting Princeton University Professor Ether Schor (author of a biography titled Emma Lazarus): “The irony is that the statue goes on speaking, even when the tide turns against immigration — even against immigrants themselves, as they adjust to their American lives…. You can’t think of the statue without hearing the words Emma Lazarus gave her.”
